(Taken from David Shapiro's interview of Jeff Wall)
David Shapiro: "Do you have any ideas on where painting is going, with the changing media today?"
Jeff Wall: "I think that painting is a permanent part of art, just like drawing is, because we have the kind of hands that we have, because we have the of eyes that we have. We're always giong to have drawing, and by extrapolation, painting. It's a consequence of what we are as organisms. Painting and drawing cannot disappear from serious art, cannot "die", as they say. They can go through all of the complex changes and developments that they have gone through, because they are permanent. And therefore, drawing is a kind of touchstone for all pictorial art, regardless, because it won't and can't be replaced with anything else. Painting as a medium and a form can't change very much. So, that makes it very interesting, and very open too. If it was not so simple and flexible and beautiful, it would be changing technologically, but it's too right just as it is to change, and so, it's going to stay there. I'm very involved with painting, always have been and always will be, not particularly because I want to paint, but because it is the most sophisticated, ancient practice."
DS: "So you don't see yourself as a documentary photographer in any way?"
JW: "Sure I do. I think that all photography contains an element of reportage, just by nature, and so, everybody who practices it comes into relation with that aspect in one way or another. What's interesting is that there's no one way, anymore, to come into that relationship. I think in 1945 or 1955, it was clear that if you wanted to come into relation with reportage, you had to go out in the field and function like a photojournalist or documentary photographer in some way; it really does connect to the nature of the medium. Bit, still, it does not cover the horizon. There are other practices that are equally deeply connected to what photography is, and as well, there is no single way to satisfy the documentary demand. There's no one way to come into this relationship with reportage. I think that's what people in the 701's and 80's really worked on; not to deny the validity of documentary photography, but to investigate potentials that were blocked before, blocked by a kind of orthodoxy about what photography really was."
DS: "Do you have ideas about further experimentation in photography or do you feel set in a medium for expression?"
JW: "Well, I've been doing black-and-white now for four or five years."
DS: "Why?"
JW: "I started doing black-and-white because when I first started working in color, which was in the 70's, I knew that, while color was important, it was also only one aspect of the medium. Black-and-white is a peculiar kind of image. Drawings, for example, with a pen and pencil, are black-and-white. The idea of non-color images is very old, and it really derives from the medium of drawing, because if you have a piece of chalk, it's only one color. You make the drawing, and it's all in color, but the world isn't in one color. That anomaly really goes right back to the beginning of art--just having one substance to depict all the other substances. So, photgraphy also has that in its black-and-white. So, it seemed to me that if you're going to work in the medium of photography, you couldn't just work in color; just like in the 70's and in the 60's, a lot of people trying to do new things said that you can't just work in black-and-white, you've got to work in color. That's true, but it's the other way around as well. So I very much wanted to work in black-and-white, for a long time. Then in around1988, I saw the work of a few other photgraphers who were working in large-scale in black-and-white; Craig Horsfield was the most important one, and I thought, God that's interesting--I haven't seen such interesting black-and-white work on the scale that I've been working on, and it gave me more of a stimulus to get involved with what I wanted to do. It took me a while to resolve some of the technical problems of working in black-and-white at the scale I wanted, and so I didn't actually make any large prints until 1996. Now I consider black-and-white to be an integrel part of what I'm doing. It seems to me just a completion or expansion of what photography is. I like to see myself as a Modernist, in that I'm responding to what the medium really is."
Jeff Wall: In His Own Words
(Taken from David Shapiro's interview of Jeff Wall)
David Shapiro: "Do you have any ideas on where painting is going, with the changing media today?"
Jeff Wall: "I think that painting is a permanent part of art, just like drawing is, because we have the kind of hands that we have, because we have the of eyes that we have. We're always giong to have drawing, and by extrapolation, painting. It's a consequence of what we are as organisms. Painting and drawing cannot disappear from serious art, cannot "die", as they say. They can go through all of the complex changes and developments that they have gone through, because they are permanent. And therefore, drawing is a kind of touchstone for all pictorial art, regardless, because it won't and can't be replaced with anything else. Painting as a medium and a form can't change very much. So, that makes it very interesting, and very open too. If it was not so simple and flexible and beautiful, it would be changing technologically, but it's too right just as it is to change, and so, it's going to stay there. I'm very involved with painting, always have been and always will be, not particularly because I want to paint, but because it is the most sophisticated, ancient practice."
DS: "So you don't see yourself as a documentary photographer in any way?"
JW: "Sure I do. I think that all photography contains an element of reportage, just by nature, and so, everybody who practices it comes into relation with that aspect in one way or another. What's interesting is that there's no one way, anymore, to come into that relationship. I think in 1945 or 1955, it was clear that if you wanted to come into relation with reportage, you had to go out in the field and function like a photojournalist or documentary photographer in some way; it really does connect to the nature of the medium. Bit, still, it does not cover the horizon. There are other practices that are equally deeply connected to what photography is, and as well, there is no single way to satisfy the documentary demand. There's no one way to come into this relationship with reportage. I think that's what people in the 701's and 80's really worked on; not to deny the validity of documentary photography, but to investigate potentials that were blocked before, blocked by a kind of orthodoxy about what photography really was."
DS: "Do you have ideas about further experimentation in photography or do you feel set in a medium for expression?"
JW: "Well, I've been doing black-and-white now for four or five years."
DS: "Why?"
JW: "I started doing black-and-white because when I first started working in color, which was in the 70's, I knew that, while color was important, it was also only one aspect of the medium. Black-and-white is a peculiar kind of image. Drawings, for example, with a pen and pencil, are black-and-white. The idea of non-color images is very old, and it really derives from the medium of drawing, because if you have a piece of chalk, it's only one color. You make the drawing, and it's all in color, but the world isn't in one color. That anomaly really goes right back to the beginning of art--just having one substance to depict all the other substances. So, photgraphy also has that in its black-and-white. So, it seemed to me that if you're going to work in the medium of photography, you couldn't just work in color; just like in the 70's and in the 60's, a lot of people trying to do new things said that you can't just work in black-and-white, you've got to work in color. That's true, but it's the other way around as well. So I very much wanted to work in black-and-white, for a long time. Then in around1988, I saw the work of a few other photgraphers who were working in large-scale in black-and-white; Craig Horsfield was the most important one, and I thought, God that's interesting--I haven't seen such interesting black-and-white work on the scale that I've been working on, and it gave me more of a stimulus to get involved with what I wanted to do. It took me a while to resolve some of the technical problems of working in black-and-white at the scale I wanted, and so I didn't actually make any large prints until 1996. Now I consider black-and-white to be an integrel part of what I'm doing. It seems to me just a completion or expansion of what photography is. I like to see myself as a Modernist, in that I'm responding to what the medium really is."